Oops!  I’m not sure how that extra millennium crept in.  The date was, of course,  winter 873/874.

@ichabod

Those Vikings were *everywhere*.  What a mob!

Indeed they were.  What we had stumbled on was in fact the winter camp of the Viking Great Army, documented in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle in 1873/4.

The Saxon church was adjacent to a monastery, a double house of both men and women, ruled by an Abbess. The Vikings sacked the monastery and b…[Read more]

@ichabod

The person you are thinking of is Hypatia of Alexandria and, although no surviving writings or commentaries can be attributed to her with any certainty, she was an eminent and highly respected Neoplatonist philosopher, mathematician and astronomer in the late 4th/early 5th century CE.   Alexandria at that time was still a great centre…[Read more]

@ichabod

(moving the conversation here, since it doesn’t really belong on Spoilers)

I had the pleasure of working with teams of volunteers from Earthwatch over several seasons during the 1980s. The excavation was one in which, as a glutton for punishment, I took part in during my annual leave from my official paying job. It began in 1974 when I…[Read more]

@winston

I haven’t yet seen the hedgehog – they tend to be nocturnal – but there has been plenty of visible evidence around in the form of droppings, and one of my next-door neighbours confirmed that she had seen one sleeping under her garden shed. It is a fair few years since we last had one in the neighbourhood and is very welcome, not least…[Read more]

@pedant

Your talk of vintage cars prompted a memory of the most glamourous car my family ever owned, back around 1950/51 when I was a mere sprout. It was an  MG WA 2.6 litre sports saloon, of which less than 400 were produced between 1938 and 1939 and, to cap it all, the registration was MG 6277.  It was going cheap – maybe because, if I r…[Read more]

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@Missy

I meant to add to the above how sorry I was to read about the accident and to add my commiserations, but had to break off and run when I realised I was about to be late for an appointment.

Thank goodness your OH was not too seriously hurt, but even when there are no serious injuries that kind of thing tends to leave one badly shaken up;…[Read more]

@Missy

Not your point at all, I’m afraid. My fault you misunderstood, because I realised after I had hit ‘submit’, but too late to edit, that what I had written was ambiguous and could be taken the wrong way.

By ‘cod science’ I meant the kind of specious reasoning peddled by the hirelings of oil companies and their like who have a vested…[Read more]

@pedant

There could scarcely be a more graphic demonstration of the difference between the local and the global in terms of climate trends,  but none so blind as those who refuse to see – or who allow themselves to be convinced by cod ‘science’!

@thane16

Moving the conversation here, since it long ago wandered off topic for Spoilers.

I sure hope those frogs are thankful!

While I was putting the finishing touches to the pond – arranging pebbles on the shelving shallow end to enable hedgehogs and other small creatures to come down and drink, or pond life to climb in and out – they kept…[Read more]

@MissRori

he said that when 12’s costume was originally being developed with his input, there were complaints from BBC higher-ups that it wasn’t going to push a lot of toys,

Sadly, that seems to epitomise the changes in the Beeb since the early days of Who. The show then was made – relatively speaking – on a shoestring, but the producers, dir…[Read more]

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@janetteB @thane16

The one thing to be said for the generally unbecoming and often hideous school uniforms which most of my generation in Britain were obliged to wear back in the day, is that at least bullies couldn’t seize on our – or our parents’ – choice of clothes as a pretext for picking on people. Our sartorial self-expression in school…[Read more]

@ddoherty95

@janetteB @winston and @JimTheFish have pretty much summed it up. Every actor has brought something different to the role and that fact, along with the vision of successive show runners and writers,  is how the show has managed to survive for so long – because it has evolved and expanded in scop0e.  There can be no universal ‘best’ D…[Read more]

@ucragnian @pedant

There is also the problem that there you can’t guarantee that there will always be a sledgehammer to hand when you need  one, and a sledgehammer is a pretty cumbersome thing to carry around on the off chance that you might encounter a weeping angel.  You would also need safety goggles, because a stone chip in the eye would c…[Read more]

Strictly speaking, this is not Doctor Who news, but there is a Doctor Who connection. The first episode of a new drama, Collateral, airs next Monday on BBC2 and, according to the Radi0 Times (dead tree edition), it is a thriller which poses questions about the experience and treatment of migrants and immigrants in Britain. The writer is David Hare…[Read more]

@XAD4

Sad news indeed to read on waking.   A great writer who wrote with vision, clarity, depth and profound insight, and she wrote beautifully.

I have loved her novels and writings since I first discovered The Left Hand of Darknessin the early 1970s and her books, which fill almost an entire shelf in my library, will continue to enrich my l…[Read more]

@JimTheFish

Sonic earrings?  We can only hope! The ultimate in cool, and so discreet 😉